Tranglo enables accelerated growth with Nutanix

Today, Tranglo can process 100 percent more transactions in a day, knowing that their rapidly growing customer base will enjoy the same high level of service 24/7 thanks to the scalability and reliability of their IT. Tranglo can also plough the savings they’ve gained from moving to Nutanix into hiring more personnel and providing training to staff to advance their skill sets. Plus, with the resiliency of the Nutanix solution and its inbuilt disaster recovery capabilities, Tranglo keeps customer data well protected and financial regulators satisfied that the company is fully compliant.

CHALLENGE

Kuala Lumpur-based Tranglo is a leading cross-border money and prepaid credit transaction hub. This hub covers 18 countries, including the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, as well as 1,300 banks and e-wallets services. It also includes 130,000 cash pickup points. In addition, Tranglo facilitates the settlement of goods and services using multiple currencies as part of a Forex (FX) service. In 2017, Tranglo processed $1 billion worth of transactions. By 2019 that figure had already jumped to $2.3 billion.

Both people and companies depend on the Tranglo service. Large numbers of workers in South East Asia regularly transfer money to families in different countries using Tranglo, and business customers in different time zones use the service to make transactions. The business needs to run 24/7, and to do that Tranglo needs a solid IT platform. The company’s first platform comprised a three-tier infrastructure, but as the business grew—particularly the business-to-business (B2B) side—Tranglo looked for a more flexible platform that enabled them to scale compute, storage and networking easily.

All these advantages were available in a public cloud, and Tranglo moved B2B systems such as a main database, the application programming interface (API) server and web server to a public cloud service. The solution appeared to meet Tranglo’s needs until the time when the finance team reported that cloud expenditure was increasing 10-20 percent every six months. Nelss Liow, Chief Information Officer at Tranglo says, “This opened everyone’s eyes to the potential costs of a pubic cloud and made everyone think about what those costs could be in a few years’ time if the business continued growing at the current rate.” Yet, Tranglo didn’t want to turn back the clock and return their B2B workloads to a traditional three-tier infrastructure. They needed a cloud solution that delivered the simplicity and agility of a public cloud, along with the security needed for enterprise datacenter, but at lower cost.

SOLUTION

Tranglo spoke to the IT partner that continued supporting them with their remaining three-tier infrastructure. The partner proposed a Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform to meet their needs. Tranglo launched a proof of concept where they ran Nutanix, VxRail and SimpliVity solutions head-to-head. Of the three providers, Nutanix was the better deal, offering a lower investment cost without the need to sacrifice system performance. It came with an all-flash set-up, and great flexibility around future upgrades and expansion.

Tranglo deployed three Nutanix nodes with the Acropolis Operating System (AOS) and AHV as the virtualization hypervisor. The solution also included Prism for single-pane management of the complete Nutanix stack, from storage, compute and networking to the virtual machines (VMs). Tranglo then migrated all their B2B public cloud workloads to Nutanix, and soon after started migrating all their B2C in-house built applications as well. To-date, Tranglo, which has added two more Nutanix nodes to the platform, has migrated 70 percent of their workloads, with the remaining 30 percent due to be migrated before the end of 2020.

CUSTOMER OUTCOME

Tranglo can watch the number of people and businesses using their services grow and not think twice about the infrastructure in place. Nelss says, “We can process 3 times more transactions with our Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, and to increase capabilities we just add more nodes.” Greater processing performance means that as more workers send money home to families and businesses in different time zones and process settlements, Tranglo is assured that they can continue to deliver a high-level of service no matter the workload.

The company also has more resources to invest in the business because of the cost savings from migrating off a public cloud. “Compared to a public cloud, a private cloud built on Nutanix was 50 percent less costly over a three-year period, according to our findings,” says Nelss. The savings can be used to hire more people and prioritize training to improve their skill sets. The money can also be reinvested in the IT infrastructure.

IT staff are more productive in their work, thanks to the simplified monitoring and management using Prism. Nelss comments, “The solution gives full visibility across the Nutanix stack, and staff can complete routine tasks, such as launching new virtual machines, in a couple of clicks.” Not only is management simplified, but less mental energy is needed to oversee critical areas such as data protection and service recovery. The IT team doesn’t need to worry about a service going down because of the Nutanix stack’s high availability mode. “This inbuilt resiliency ensures we tick all the boxes for regulators around service reliability and disaster recovery planning,” says Nelss.

NEXT STEPS

With the support of Nutanix, Tranglo can continue improving business performance through better IT management and the evolution of their applications, using microservices. The company plans to explore Nutanix Calm, one of the Nutanix Essentials products that brings self-service capabilities to application management and orchestration. The organization could also consider Nutanix Karbon to deploy a full Kubernetes cluster for microservices. What’s certain is the company will continue adding nodes to the current cluster in line with business expansion and is starting discussions around creating a dedicated disaster recovery site.